Does Calorie Shifting Really Work For Weight Loss?

Calorie shifting is at the heart of many of the most popular weight loss diets of the 1990s and 2000s. On one hand, they are popular because some people have experienced success with them. On the other, this kind of weight loss plan contradicts the best, healthiest practices recommended by the likes of health counselor Maya Paul and Harvard nutritionist Walter Willett.

Calorie Shifting

The concept of calorie shifting, reports resource website CalorieShiftingDiets, is that your body reacts differently to different sources of calories. By skewing your food intake to eliminate or eat a lot of one kind of calorie, you can push your body into states that burn fat faster than it normally would. The three basic calorie sources are protein, carbohydrates and fats, according to information distributed by the USDA.

Examples

The Atkins diet is probably the most famous example of a calorie-shifting diet, and has avoiding carbohydrates at its core. Other examples of calorie-shifting diets include The Zone, South Beach, and all of those diets that promise weight loss if you eat large quantities of a specific food.

Benefits

The benefit of a calorie-shifting diet, reports Oregon fitness coach Ben Cohn, is that the science is real. If you overload your body with one kind of calorie, or eliminate another calorie source, your body enters one or another kind of emergency physiological state. Under some of these states, for example, the ketosis state behind the Atkins diet, your body burns fat an an accelerated rate.

Risks

The problem with calorie-shifting diets is that they are unhealthy and unsustainable. According to Paul and Willett, healthy weight loss diets contain the same proportions of food as a standard diet. You just eat them in smaller quantities. Malnutrition, organ damage and even scurvy are among the health problems associated with calorie shifting if you do it for too long or to extremes.